Hero
by Jack inthe Box
Summary: Sometimes, when he's huddled against the indecently pungent boxcar wall of the train, Ben sleeps.


Hero.  
- a **The Walking Dead** game fanfic.  
**Genre -** Angst  
**Character[s] -** Ben Paul, [sort of] Katjaa and Duck, mentions of others.  
- possible spoilers for beyond **Episode Two - Starved For Help**  
- **Rating** - T, just because of a single curse word and content matter [suicidal thoughts, death, and other such good feelings and actions when a zombie apocalypse is involved]  
**Summary** - Sometimes, when he's huddled against the indecently pungent boxcar wall of the train, Ben sleeps.  
**Recommended reading music -**'Hero' by Regina Spektor.

* * *

. Sometimes, when he's huddled against the indecently pungent boxcar wall of the train, Ben sleeps. When he sleeps, it's tame, dark, unmemorable. Dreams meet him on rare occasions. In one, once long ago at the Motor Inn, Ben loses again the chance to say goodbye. He can see his mom wishing him fun as he leaves their house to go to school for the band trip. She croons her typical reminder of love for her baby boy. She's even wearing that red t-shirt with the tuba on the front she bought - for her own birthday - to support the school band program. To support him.  
. There's a sharp flare sensation, like adjusting to the harsh burn of a winter landscape after emerging from under a thick quilt. Lit, blinding pin-pricks, then gone. He never replied. His friend had been waiting in his car. No, no embarrassment, just keep walking, and so he does. Her face, devoid of make-up, is muddled and crumbled into reds and greys, yellows and blues with all the imaginable hues of purple, dented and gory, mashed up, a wad of bloodied tissue paper.  
She dies before of him in a matter of seconds, falling, a heap upon herself in front of their busted screen door with the screen that's duct taped on because no yardsales had a new screen door cheap enough for them. He can do nothing, save for watch in a mix of day-glo horror and confusion.

. Lately, it is the boy and his mother who appear to shame him against this single admitted original sin. They are nameless in sleep, though their features are more giving than any tag could be. As in the last time he ever saw them alive, the mother keeps her arms around her boy, for he became more valuable than even the last breath of air she sucked in between her teeth before the gunshot.  
. They do not sizzle into corpses. Ben knew these types of dreams were the ones with an after-taste long left over, crammed up in his molars where his tongue couldn't quite angle in right to scrape it out. The mother and son stand before him, observing, and pressing fingers only against each other as they hugged. Sallowness tinted the boy's complexion, eyes coloured in out of the lines with a frank succumbing, and pointed ahead always. The tired mother's look never left Ben's. She watched. Whatever Ben yearned to muster the courage to ask – _what do you see?_ – was hard coming and never arrived at all. Dreams kept themselves softened without words to those two he inadvertently killed.  
. And when he woke from their gazes, his unconscious body movements dominated how his eyes tried to see beyond the confines to something or someone lingering for him in that faraway place, back to a better world. The malevolent sense of a door crashing against its frame, shut without the hope of reverse, would quake through him. But that door, Ben did his bitterless best to remind himself after waking, had been shut by his worthlessness, and even then for a longer amount locked. Irredeemable, he repented under an indignant rage; he bent it inward and cheated himself out of changing it all in a dream, of imagining all the differences someone like him could never make then being made.  
. Outside of sleep, every look of those around him struck as hollow, a heckling rattle against his existence with them. _Can't do anything right, just fucks it all up_. It festered, an open wound, as difficult to look at. In sleep, everything became better. In sleep, at least, his existence was matterless.

. He is bodiless in all dreams he has. There are no exceptions, and he doesn't mind. Usually he's a pair of eyes suspended sorely by optical nerves with a fishing hook set-up, cast in and out. Ben is thankful for it. Reality, or the dream state of it, is so much easier when he finds he doesn't have to lurch forward or run away, move limbs, open a mouth for a choppy selection of words on discount sale. No bothersome burning in his throat, prickling ever so faintly as his stomach contracts unpleasantly; he cannot be thankful for not eating anything because there is nothing to eat, but it only hurts more with bile corroding a raw throat.  
. He cannot even cry, hands gripping tightly upon upper arms, a pencil on the edge of a desk during an earthquake, rolling, rolling, rolling until he teeters off the edge, cracking rigidly against the ground, hands flying to pinch his lips together, quiet the rising din of a sob, the alarm bells for weakness no longer expressible.  
. To respond is beyond him, but he does feel a seeping chill, slinking about whatever _him_ is in all dreams. It is not entirely unpleasant, but parallel to when he knew far younger years – a boy outside, burying his hand deeply into the dirt, calling out to his mom because _why is it so colder_? The explanation leaves him nowadays, but he thinks now it's because he has been continually left to claw deeper into the dirt with only his hands until, six feet in, he will sleep –  
he hopes.

. When the train rattles most, and his head clunks against the wall three too many times, Ben wakes and wonders why. Consciousness only serves as a burning effect 'round the edge of his eyes. Ghostly figures play etch and sketch in his stomach, dissatisfied, shaking and shaking. Or maybe _he_is shaking, blanketless because his turn with the small quilt they found yesterday is gone; a slumbering girl shares it tonight with a man who has vouched too often for his guiltlessness, which is in fact guilt-ridden of a lie in every colour of blood that fills the lines of his palms and unkempt fingernails.  
. Sleep-squint vision lets him see it, so he stuffs his hands into the hole-filled pockets of his band jersey and tells himself it's due to how cold it is. The sliding door is open enough to usher a whistling breeze directly into him, though he does not move because the homeless man is perched at the exit, humming. Ben drowsily adjusts the pitch in his head so it is the out of focus tone of his mother when she does the dishes.  
. He closes his eyes, breath rippling out, laid out upon the raft on the river between sleep and semi-consciousness. The subdued drone of the hum stirs him enough he cannot sink deeper. _Mom_, his thoughts stick to this monosyllabic word. He is disarmed, open far too wide. He burrows his fingers into what stained fabric is left inside his pockets, drawing his knees up until they are braced against his tightened chest. There is no lack of a body to save him from not having to react. Every emotion demands a movement to express things he does not know how to translate with a heart as gangly as his limbs. He curls his toes into his grimy socks, against the scratchy ruined insole.  
. A senior in high school, he never could have imagined the day where he'd shed tears over missing his mother, missing the closure of knowing her fate, and she his, to soothe two aching minds separated across a mass grave of dead; to search would to be risking a fall from the tip of an already crumbling precipice. His mother, he thinks - with her blue eyes which matched his in every crescent eyed smile at him and her cinnamon bun of dishwater blond hair he only inherited highlights of - would step off of it.  
. Ben removes a hand from a pocket to pinch his lips shut, stifling a whimper. He knows he is not as good as his mother, having taken after his father in running away as any contemptible coward can. On the rim he will delay 'til the yawn of the ground unsteadies the dirt, gone, and sinks him.

. Gone – like the mother and her bitten boy she held onto as long as she could under the potency of his blunder. The sand paper of sleep rubs away his wakefulness until he is lessened enough for trembling shoulders and his other hand to swipe at his eyes. Subdued muffles of a self-loathing type matched the swirl of thrumming waters ebb against widening fault lines in a dam, too submerged to be detected.  
. The train commotions on and Ben, quietly bereft and without a single soul to soothe him into something near peace, wills himself to sleep without chance of his own heart wanting to wake him once more. He will never see his mother again, and he will not be given the chance to die in her arms as the boy he never meant to help kill almost died in his own mom's reassuring hold.  
. Ben deserves not even the comfort of a murmured white sin - that it would be all right. To pass away in his sleep would be too much of a mercy for him, and he imagines dying because of another poor choice of his own. If Ben can see it coming, he squeezes his eyes shut against the thought, he will let go himself to confirm something they all know of him. To be a hero would be a task too great for him, so he will sidestep the responsibility, and fall away, unable to save even himself.  
. Uneven breathing ironing out, his body's quivers slowing in intensity, he begins to fall asleep. He doesn't bother to wipe the last of the tears away from red-streaked eyes as it sticks uncomfortably upon skin and lashes. The filthy material of his jacket chafes at his flesh through a t-shirt dotted and decorated in rips as he tugs into himself, shoulders inward, head ducked, legs gawkily pulled up. The world rolls and simmers away from him. All of it passes in a pinchful of seconds.

. After the loud thunks and low-pitched screeches of the train vanish, he feels a nestling of a small child push against his crossed limbs. Eyes opened with a bleary view, he watches as the dead boy, complexion a glossy daub of health, rests his head against Ben's now agape arms. A tingle of warmth resonates through him at the contact, and the customary cold nip is wanting.  
. He blinks his freshly stinging eyes multiple times and opens his mouth to let the apology slobber down from his lips and drip upon the boy. Before words can form, a familiar sigh behind him tickles the nape of his neck. He tries to strain his neck to see if it's truly the boy's mother, but fingertips ghost across his hair, sliding across his scalp. His tensed shoulders droop and he finds himself leaning back against the plump frame of the mother's body.  
. Ben is exhausted, polluted; he has eroded from weathering out the violent storm life erupted into, but her presence whittles it down into something like an imprint of a bad dream poisoning the next morning. She brushes his messy hair away from his forehead, adjusting his head so it rests against the crook of her neck and shoulder. She is warm, safe.  
. It is nothing like his mother's more firm but receding into feathery touches when he became sick last, and she threaded herself beside him, singing and holding his hand, calming and wordlessly loving with touches of respite a mother solely could give.

. The vibrations of the dead woman's tender, breathy singing consoled every return of pinching guilt, too large to be brought up no matter how jarringly Ben pulls. Her hand glides over his cheek, creeping like spider legs upon his neck. It stills above his pulse, as if reminding him how his heart still throbbed. That she is dead, her son is dead, and Ben is alive, never claiming his blame to a mourning husband who watched everyone he loved glance a concluding goodbye. A sob catches in his throat, swells and chokes him, threatens to burst; he cannot let this pass without his say.

"I'm so sorry. I.. I didn't want any of that to happen.. I just.. –" A forcibly detached, morose disharmony arises to accompany her hum. Ben's tone holds a suffering too haunting for a boy of his age. Swept underneath, a blemish of a plea. '_We are going to end up okay_,' it begs. '_Say you are. Say_I_will_.

"It's all right," she repeats, a broken, repetitive whisper in his ear.

. The vivid enclosure of her arms, the clasp of the boy's hand over his own, protects him that night. The rattle-clank screech of the train tracks serves as a fitting good night bid. Ben burrows himself into the embrace of phantoms, happy after so long, and lapses into a dreamless repose.


End file.
